Guest columnist
The general who has (gasp!) religious beliefs

By Collin Levey
Special to The Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Everywhere we turned this week, religion was on the front burner. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was chastised by President Bush for saying that Jews run the world. The Supreme Court is preparing to decide whether the words "under God" should be excised from the Pledge of Allegiance. And a general in the Army, William Boykin, was pilloried for his comments to religious groups in Oregon and elsewhere that militant Islam has it in for the U.S. because America is a "Christian nation."

When it comes to drawing outrage, Christians take the cake from Jews, Muslims and atheists nearly every time.

Newspaper editorials across the country howled at Boykin's "religious bigotry" and called his comments "extreme and pernicious." (Words that were not leveled at Mahathir.) After the spitstorm in the media, Boykin apologized and invited a Defense Department investigation into the comments he made at the gatherings. Democrats demanded he resign.

We'll leave aside the dubious stone-throwing rights of a party that welcomes Al Sharpton into its presidential folds. What's so unsettling is that Gen. Boykin's comments read like little more than a stump speech from a decorated military leader about fighting evil. The only difference was that Boykin dared to call evil "Satan" to a group that considers "evil" and "Satan" synonymous.

Let's look at the charges. Boykin is in hot soup for his retelling of a conversation he had with a Somali warlord. In response to his enemy's insistence that Allah would protect him from American military might, Boykin recalled feeling that "I knew that my God was a real god, and his was an idol."

What sounds like a broad-brush swipe at Islam actually makes the distinction that American Islamic groups and moderate Islamists around the world have maintained — that militant Islamists don't worship the real Allah, who is a God of peace.

One problem here, of course, is the hyper-sensitivity that surrounds any religious utterance from the Bush administration. John Ashcroft is still berated for his arch comment that "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you." Bush is branded a zealot for inadvisably using the word "crusade" to refer to hunting terrorists.

Many of Boykin's critics, including the Council on American Islamic Relations, insist his remarks were "damaging" because they confirm to the "Arab street" that the U.S. is at war with their religion. But in much of the world, anti-Western conspiracy theories run rampant regardless of our words and actions. A few stray remarks like Boykin's don't add meaningful kindling to this bonfire.

In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, the rumor mills from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan rallied furiously around yarns about Israel or the CIA being the real bomber of the World Trade Center, or even that the attacks never happened; they were one big fake.

Sure, there will be attempts to exploit the concern over Boykin. After applauding the Malaysian prime minister's fulminations about Jews, Egypt's foreign minister Ahmed Maher intoned, "We hope that those who condemned Mahathir's speech lend more attention to the words of the American general who demonstrated hostility toward Islam and Muslims."

We'll leave it to the Egyptians to parse how "Jews" that "control the world by proxy" managed the feat of making a U.S. Army general proclaim America a "Christian country."

It's probably not a big news flash to the Arab world that America remains, overwhelmingly, a Christian country. Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists make up less than 5 percent of the country's population. That figure does perhaps surprise Americans, who see their country's identity defined by the diversity of the melting pot.

But Americans are equally puzzled by other people's need to frame all their allegiances and alliances in terms of religion. Saddam Hussein was a notorious secularist who suppressed militant Islam, yet he remains an "Islamic" hero to many Arabs for standing up to the U.S.

Saudi Arabia is an avowedly religious state, protector of the holy shrines of Islam, yet is treated as an apostate by radical Islamists because of its de facto alliance with the U.S., a "Christian" power.

Americans are the most religious people on Earth by some measures, yet, unlike our enemies, amazingly capable of managing a complex and healthy ambiguity about the connection between religion and public policy. Boykin, contrary to his critics, is a perfect example:

He saved his preachments for meetings with like-minded audiences. Many Americans perhaps share his sentiments, many don't. Unlike the Arab world, however, we manage to debate the proper role of religion in public life with newspaper editorials, not car bombs.

By every account, Boykin is an excellent soldier and intelligence officer. There was a reason he was sent out to deal with Somali warlords, as "multicultural" a job as you can find. The great and unique American success is that his private beliefs were no stumbling block to fighting and dying for a country that affords the same rights and freedoms to Hindus, Jews, Muslims and every other faith, or lack thereof.

Collin Levey, a former writer and editor for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, is based in Seattle and writes regularly for editorial pages of The Seattle Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company